The the Hays Code came along and you had to be punished or repent, preferably both. But, before then, we had movies like Mandalay, where our heroine lives in sin, becomes a prostitute... and continues from there.
During the 30s, Kay Francis was on the covers of all of the movie magazines, but she's relatively forgotten today. It's too bad: While many of her films don't hold up over time, she does. Her demeanor is low-key and, if anything, she underacts, but she serves glamour like no one's business. Francis wears clothes like Dietrich or Dovima.
Not only can she make the most tricky of outfits seem like something she just threw on, she also has the grace and savoir-faire that could make a backless sequinned gown seem occasion-appropriate to a PTA meeting. I mean, it makes perfect sense that Kay Francis would pay a visit to the police station while wearing a floor-length white gown, a hat with a two-foot brim and a fan that unfurls to about a yard wide.
So, we open with Kay--here Tanya Borodoff--on a boat with Ricardo Cortez, her no-good, gun-running lover. He may look great in a white linen suit, but he's a terminal loser who can't pull off a deal. But Kay worships the ground he walks upon....
I believe it was Bessie Smith who said that there's nothing as dangerous as a man who knows how much you love him. It may not have been her words but, regardless, truer ones were never spoken. As Kay Francis is about to learn....
So Sleazebag Boyfriend takes Kay to the Jardin d' Orient nightclub in Rangoon, where he introduces her around to a variety of shady characters, including Nick, who owns the joint and the Countess, who's the resident hostess/madam, as well as some leering old guys in tuxedos. Then Sleazebag trades Kay Francis to Nick for a few cases of machine guns. That's an ammosexual for ya: Whether it's 20 grade-school kids or the woman you love, nothing's quite as important....
Kay sulks and hunger strikes, albeit in a lovely room with a gorgeous carved bed. Then the Countess gives her some wise advice..
Kay Francis decides to do precisely that, making a killer entrance into the Jardin d'Orient that lets everyone know who's the most precious piece of ass in all of Asia--fuck, perhaps the entire Eastern hemisphere...
We then get a too-brief montage of Kay Francis changing outfits, accepting gifts, drinking cocktails and playing torch songs--okay, the same torch song, over and over--on the piano for an adoring audience of men.
Kay Francis is now calling herself "Spot White" for reasons i'm unsure of--Because she always wears white? Because she's one of the few white chicks working the club? Because she's a White Russian? Because she drinks White Russians? No matter.
She gets hauled down to the police station, prompting a fantastic scene in which an utterly blase Kay Francis not only doesn't get deported, but winds up sashaying away with 10,000 of the police chief's rupees to buy herself out of the Jardin d'Orient with enough left over for a nice cabin on the next boat to Mandalay and a new wardrobe of ladylike white clothes. Kay Francis was apparently applying the "if i wear all white, i will look less trampy" philosophy long before Lana Turner in The Postman Always Rings Twice...
Of course, as she's unpacking, she drops her framed photo of Sleazeball Boyfriend--Wait, why did she have that? I've been known to forgive a man anything (twice) but even i would give the Soviet wiped-from-history treatment to anyone who sold me into prostitution. Anyway, she cuts herself on the glass and the cabin boy runs to the bar and gets a doctor there to come look at it and, woohoo, meet cute. Well, kind of. It doesn't take long before he reveals that he's an alcoholic who once operated drunk and killed someone, so he's going off to some colony where everyone has the plague so he can do penance and probably die. She, of course, hears this and immediately wants to come with him....
“We’re two wrecked people. We need each other.”
But wait! Guess who else is on the boat? Why, Sleazeball Boyfriend, of course. He sneaks into Kay Francis' cabin, but she brushes him off. Although first she stares meaningfully at the bottle of wound cleaner or whatever the doctor left her, helpfully labeled POISON in big letters. But then it seems Sleazeball Boyfriend disappears--having taken the bottle of POISON and fallen/jumped/was pushed off the boat. Everyone suspects Kay Francis of murder...
... but then they find not only Sleazeball Boyfriend's suicide note, but a note someone had sent warning him that the cops were waiting for him in Mandalay. Phew! But then Sleazeball Boyfriend returns! he just faked his own death and, well, if it almost got her arrested for murder, that's oke, toots! He's also heard how successful Kay Francis was peddling it and he has this great idea that they'll open up their own whorehouse. Then he can quit running guns and just pimp her out full-time...
... and Kay Francis thinks, "You know, everybody believes this guy is already dead." What will Kay
Francis do?
As the great Bebe Zahara Benet once said, "I give face, face, face..."
Mandalay is just over an hour long, which is fine by me: There's no bullshit subplots, no droning on with dialogue, no stupid twists to pad out the running time. It also seems like a film that could have starred Marlene Dietrich--white Russian adventuress who becomes queen of a Far East brothel and then avenges herself on the man who wronged her... it's kind of like Shanghai Express meets Dishonored. Hell, Mandalay even has Warner Oland white slave-ing Kay Francis two years after he attempted to do the same with Dietrich in Express. There's also more than a touch of The Shangahi Gesture here as well....
As for Kay Francis herself, she once said, "When I die, I want to be cremated so that no sign of my existence is left on this earth. I can't wait to be forgotten." Francis was always underwhelmed by fame--it seems she never really intended to be an actress but, sort of wandered into it on a combination of beauty, style and being in the right place at the right time. Francis' interests were chiefly men, booze and travel and she saw movie stardom as a way to get away with it--not unlike those two other legendary existential beauties, Ava Gardner or Louise Brooks. While she may not be quite as iconic as those ladies, Kay Francis is still worth another look...
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